


beg, steal or borrow

by hellebored



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: 70th Hunger Games, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:47:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23600071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellebored/pseuds/hellebored
Summary: Whatever anyone might say about her, Annie Cresta makes a habit of beating the odds.Finnick's POV, directly pre- and post-Seventieth Games.
Relationships: Annie Cresta/Finnick Odair
Comments: 9
Kudos: 64





	beg, steal or borrow

**Author's Note:**

> _I beg steal or borrow to keep you from trouble  
>  I can't feel if I don't see you  
> I beg steal or borrow to keep you from sorrow  
> I can't say there's always me, but there's something. [(x)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SHyX-ZSpi4)_

The year after Finnick wins the Games, Mags does her best to guide him through his first season as a mentor, but nothing quite prepares him for the disappointment, the sadness.

Regardless of what he does, regardless of how good he was, it doesn't matter. _He's_ not the one going into the arena. They die. They die. They die. They die.

Then, for the seventieth Games, there's Annie.

Annie is nearly his age, at the upper limit of the reaping, something in her favor. There's not much else. Still, he supposes it's better than watching another thirteen-year-old from his district get their brain mashed to a pulp from a dozen blows with a perfectly pristine, made-for-the-Games toilet seat.

(He is a sweet kid who blushes over a particularly tight pair of pants Finnick wears while accompanying him to a public event, and when the boy dies Haymitch is kind enough to use the hollowness in Finnick's chest as an excuse to camp out at the sponsors' bar until they both have something better to do, which in Haymitch's case means more drinking but in his suite instead, and in Finnick's case means escorting a casket.)

It doesn't take long for him to figure out Annie is going to be dead in the first five minutes.

She adamantly refuses to train with anything remotely dangerous to other human beings: _they're children_ , she says, setting herself apart from them, and he snaps that he'd speared the ones her age while they pleaded and thrashed in his nets. None of these _children_ give a damn about her moral handwringing.

After that, he spends as little time around her as possible. He finds himself some of that easy company that pays instead, which is more enjoyable than caring about a girl who won't face the reality of what it takes to survive. At least what _he's_ doing is productive.

Three days later he comes around the corner of the tribute aquatic training room looking for Annie — he can't ignore her _completely_ — in time to witness Mags clasping the girl's hands, damp from the pool, in her paper-thin ones.

A hint of reproach colors Mags' face when she catches his eye. She beckons him over.

_Watch her swim_ , she says.

—

Annie, he finds out, is a strong swimmer. One of the best he's seen. Maybe even as good as he is, if he's grudgingly honest. There's a surprising amount of muscle to her shoulders in proportion to her slender body: back home she dives for abalone and sea cucumbers off the bay, fighting her way beneath choppy waves with a net slung at her side.

And Annie, he finds out, is good at making lures, and acceptably not-awful at starting a fire, and bafflingly abysmal at tying knots. _Nobody_ who spends so much time in the ocean should be that bad at tying knots. Partly out of district pride, partly out of exasperation, he takes it upon himself to teach her.

And Annie, he finds out, has a little trouble with the fine details of hand-eye coordination, a little trouble with _this loops under that:_ he gives a dry huff and says _I bet your father darns your sweaters for you_ — her mother is dead — and slips his hands between her fingers to show her.

(He notices the way it makes her breath catch, and as it turns out leaning in close to murmur instructions in her ear doesn't help her knot-tying, either; but it certainly tells _him_ the sort of information that might actually be useful if she were some desirable sheltered debutante, which he supposes is likely how she'll be seen, if she wins. No great honor there.)

And... Annie, he finds out, furrows her brows and sticks out the tip of her tongue when she's concentrating, and has a low, husky laugh he never would've thought could come out of that slim girlish body, and has callouses on her palms, and tiny scars from razor clams on her fingers.

It's unfortunate how much he likes her. How much she reminds him of home.

—

Later he says it without thinking, hand on the doorframe of her suite, poised to head back to his own rooms for one last night that's bound to be sleepless for everyone in the tribute tower. _I'd take your place if I could. I just...wanted you to know._

It's a cruel thing to say, not helpful at all. But he can't help saying it any more than he can help prolonging the moment before he's forced to shut the door and leave her there in that sterile fancy room, alone and dreading the remainder of her life. He shouldn't get attached, he really shouldn't, and he _knows_ better than to say whatever's on his mind; but she's going to be dead soon anyway, and he really _likes_ this one, with her quietness that sometimes breaks unexpectedly into resounding laughter, like startled birds rising from water—

She stumbles across the room and envelopes him in strong swimmer's arms that shake in spite of their vicelike grip around his chest.

—

The hovercraft is waiting.

There's no advice left to give, but he finds himself searching for something, _anything_ for her to hold onto: so he tilts her chin up like the stylists do and offers her his easiest smile, the one where the sadness doesn't touch his eyes, and says _don't give up._

It's about all he can realistically ask for, and even that is probably too much.

—

Patrons aren't terribly enthusiastic about backing a Three who rounds out her first day with a sprained ankle, but after she has the presence of mind to smear the blood of a kid from District Eleven on the back of her jacket and cover his body with hers right after the canon goes off, things get a _little_ easier. Not a lot, but enough: enough for Finnick to buy her way through it all, the ankle, the frostbite, the quarter-size blisters in her mucous membranes that nearly swell her throat and eyes shut. Sponsors raise their brows at his wheedling and indulge him with false sympathy _—_ _better luck next year, eh, Finnick? —_ but she doesn't give up, and in spite of the futility of it all, neither does he.

—

Long past the point where most people have placed their bets against her, Annie keeps trying. Finnick can see it every time her exhausted legs stop kicking in the silt-darkened water, head bobbing under, only for her to jerk back into motion and propel up to the surface with a rattling gasp.

And it's there, in those final minutes watching and waiting for her sole contender to die, that Finnick finally allows himself to hope.

He focuses on the screen until his eyes burn. Mags comes to stand at his side: she's not that hard of hearing for an old woman, and she peers up at him when he says it half under his breath, _don't give up,_ and takes his hand.

It's the hope that makes him afraid.

—

Annie wakes drowning in her sheets. Medics restrain her after she pulls out her line and thrashes off the bed, and when Finnick comes by an hour later and sees the bruises beneath the straps from her yanking at them before the sedative kicked in, he has to excuse himself just long enough to bloody his knuckles against the wall in the emergency stairwell instead of against somebody's face.

Nobody who lives by the ocean would tie down a girl who'd spent eighty-four seconds pinned by a fallen tree under rushing water.

He tugs apart the straps, climbs into the bed, and pulls her up against his chest: she flails when she wakes and he lets her, only holding on with an arm around her ribs, just the way he might if he was towing a drowning person back to shore.

After a moment her breathing eases. She relaxes against him.

Nobody who's spent their whole life in the water doesn't have that intrinsic childhood memory of what it feels like to float supported by someone else.

—

Outside Annie's hospital room, Finnick watches her through the observation window while she picks at her shirt and rhythmically rocks back and forth on her bed. The doctors say it's trauma and give her pills. After she takes them the rocking and picking slow, but they never quite stop.

Finnick wonders if he should blame himself. Maybe he should. After this last week nobody owes him a damn thing anymore, a fact that is impressive all on its own: favors are what he buys with his charm whenever he isn't selling it. The truth is he'd done everything in his power to keep her alive. Probably went into the red on a few ledgers, actually. But she made it. She _won_.

The vacancy in Annie's face when he steps into the room causes a sharp twinge of something that feels a lot like guilt: maybe death _would_ have been better. Maybe he shouldn't have tried so hard for someone who wasn't meant to win, and this is what happens when you claw your way out when the odds aren't in your favor.

But the odds weren't particularly in his favor, either, and here he is. Surviving.

He drags a chair up to Annie's bedside. The doctors aren't sure why she does it, why she plucks at her shirt, but he knows. He remembers the arterial spray of blood from the boy, the other tribute from Four. How it got on her face and down her front. He strokes along the backs of her restless, spasming hands, and under his touch the compulsive picking slows, then stops. They sit like that for a while, her chest rising and falling strangely like she's trying to relearn how breathing works, and he holds her hand.

Scrubbing her free elbow across her tear-crusted eyes, Annie seems to come back to herself, and as she does she takes in his face as if she's seeing him for the first time. She raises her hand and lightly touches him, his chin, his lips, his cheekbones: he stays still for her, frozen like a statue under her examination, as the remaining tension drains from her face.

Her voice is quiet, cracked. _You're real_.

He swallows to offset the pressure of tears building at the back of his throat. What had she clung to in that black water? He thinks he knows.

Annie's hand works its way up to the shock of touseled hair at his forehead. Rubbing a strand of it between her fingers, an odd flicker of emotion crosses her lips, almost like _humor_ , and she asks how the tabloids like its new color. It's a ridiculous blue that matches a ridiculous ensemble he'd changed out of before coming to the ward, and he can't help the wide grin that splits across his face.

She _doesn't_ say she likes it. She might be pale as chalk but she's trying _very hard_ not to smile at him, and she makes a hoarse noise that resembles a laugh when he gently pokes her in the ribs and offers to dye hers to match.

She's not that different from before, not really. Not in any way that matters.

—

Regardless of what anyone thinks, Finnick doesn't keep coming to her hospital room out of pity.

Pity isn't why he starts most nights in a rather uncomfortable chair, making light-hearted chatter with someone who's usually a bit too sedated to hold a thread of conversation for more than a minute at a time, and stays until she falls asleep.

And it isn't the reason he helps her return to herself when she wanders: _five things you see, four things you can touch, three you hear, two you smell,_ a mantra he counts down with his fingers softly tapping her forearm until they get to _one thing you taste_ , which ends up being _that I need mouthwash_ so often it becomes a joke. Whatever cocktail runs through her IV leaves a metallic taste on her tongue.

And pity isn't why he presses a kiss to both freckled hands clapped tight against her ears. He knows the screams that replay over and over in her head: he's got some of those himself.

(He knows what she looks like when she shakes free of it, too, her grateful grip and trusting eyes, and it's a more beautiful sight than any flawless, shining cosmopol could ever be, with all their gifts and secrets.)

It isn't pity.

—

He loves her.

—

They kiss in the hospital garden the week before she's released to go home: her lips are a little chapped and cold in the autumn air but they warm under the pressure of his mouth. For a whole morning none of the shadows in her mind darken the light in her eyes, and he knows it's because of him.

There's never anyone he wants the way he wants Annie Cresta, after that.

∆

**Author's Note:**

> I very recently, as a grown-ass adult and for the first time, read all the books and watched all the movies over the span of four days. I regret nothing.
> 
> There's a fanmix from Annie's perspective that goes with this, [here on my tumblr](https://philosoverted.tumblr.com/post/615151036258271233/annies-the-one-who-went-mad-when-her-district).


End file.
